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Media and the representation
of gender
Margaret Gallagher
Image and reality
“How can the media be changed? How can we free women from the tyranny of
media messages limiting their lives to hearth and home?”Media sociologist Gaye
Tuchman ends her celebrated essay “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by
the Mass Media”with these two questions (Tuchman 1978: 38). Straightforward,
confident, and unambiguous, from today’s vantage point the questions may seem
naïve in their formulation. Yet in essence they encapsulate the concerns that con-
tinue to drive much feminist media analysis around the world almost four decades
later. Despite enormous transformations in national and global media landscapes,
and the development of infinitely more sophisticated approaches to media analysis
and theorizing, the fundamental issues remain those that preoccupied Tuchman and
her colleagues: power, values, representation, and identity.
Feminist cultural politics is a common thread running through much work on image
and representation, from its origins to the present. The edited collection Hearth and
Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, in which Tuchman’s“symbolic annihila-
tion”essay appears, was motivated by “an interest in the progress we are making
toward the full social equality of women”and by “the rise of the women’s move-
ment”(Kaplan Daniels 1978: v). These early analyses argued that the US media are
deeply implicated in the patterns of discrimination operating against women in
society—patterns which, through the absence, trivialization or condemnation of
women in media content, amounted to their “symbolic annihilation.”The term,
originally coined by George Gerbner in 1972, became a powerful and widely used
metaphor to describe the ways in which media images make women invisible. This
mediated invisibility, it was argued, is achieved not simply through the non-repre-
sentation of women’s points of view or perspectives on the world. When women are
“visible”in media content, the manner of their representation reflects the biases and
assumptions of those who define the public—and therefore the media—agenda.
Much of this early work attempted to establish the extent to which media content
departed from “reality.”Some of the earliest analysis was driven by personal
experience. In the early 1960s, former magazine journalist Betty Friedan, introducing
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her study of how the cultural definition of femininity in the USA shifted between
the 1940s and 1950s, explained: “There was a strange discrepancy between the reality
of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image
that I came to call the feminine mystique”(Friedan 1963: 9). A decade later, more
systematic studies of basic stereotypes were providing a basis from which to argue that
the media provided idealized versions of femininity that were “false.”For instance,
the editors of Hearth and Home concluded: “Televised images of women are in large
measure false, portraying them less as they really are, more as some might want
them to be”(Franzwa 1978: 273).
Despite the use of terms that today we might find lack nuance, these early studies
were not necessarily as unsophisticated as they are sometimes characterized. The
notion that women were being portrayed “as some might want them to be”theorizes
the media as part of a system “that cultivates the images fitting the established
structure of social relations,”a system whose function is to create cultural resistance
to change—in this case, change in the status of women (Gerbner 1978: 46–8). Gerb-
ner identifies three main tactics of resistance to change used in media imagery of
women—discrediting, isolating, and undercutting. He says that the result is a
“counterattack on the women’s movement as a social force for structural change”
(1978: 50). Betty Friedan, too, was concerned with the interplay between media
images, social change, and gender identity. Asking why the “spirited New Woman”
who dominated women’s magazines of the 1940s had, by the 1950s, given way to the
MARGARET GALLAGHER
